What One Man Can Do

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When Miles or Sonny Rollins or one of those other kings came to town, Mr. Ross would take me down to the Crawford Grill in the Hill District to see him. Mr. Ross never preached at me. He would just talk while we threw pots. And as he talked that clay took shape under his hands as if by its own mind. Mr. Ross had a beautiful wife and kids, and his house was always filled with friends and conversation, and the sauce was always cooking. I was 16 years old and I knew what I wanted to do with my life: I wanted to be Frank Ross.

The women in the audience are especially transfixed: a big, roughed-up-looking black man in a well-cut suit, talking about respect, about common sense and decency, about the dictate that our best hopes must always be acted upon.

As he talks, Strickland's big hands dance in accompaniment, slashing and sculpting the air in front of him. The M.B.A.'s look up at him with fascinated grins. The women in the audience are especially transfixed: a big, roughed-up-looking black man in a well-cut suit, talking about respect, about common sense and decency, about the dictate that our best hopes must always be acted upon, that all people everywhere possess an innate hunger for and right to the sustaining, the good, and the beautiful. Strickland sets that groove and now...now...hits them with the first photo.

It's a shot of Fallingwater, the famous Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house in western Pennsylvania. Afternoon sunlight, trees lacy with spring, the creek foaming. "Mr. Ross took me out there," he says. "I remember walking toward this house through a growth of rhododendron and just being amazed. Here I was, a 16-year-old kid from inner city Pittsburgh, looking at this house with a creek running through the middle of it. Man, where I come from, people worry about keeping water outside the house, not inside it."

Strickland lets the laughter wash over him for a moment, then cuts it off with a slicing movement of his right hand. "It was a very interesting way of looking at water," he goes on in a husky, midrange voice, not a CEO's voice or a salesman's voice or a preacher's voice but an amalgam of each, "and a very interesting way of looking at light." He draws out this last word, cutting off the final consonant like a rim shot.

"I mean," he tells the silent room, "the way that light moved around that building."

After pausing a beat, Strickland continues. "I said to myself, if I could ever bring that light into my neighborhood -- bring it to people who deserved it as much as anybody else, and who would respond to it as wholeheartedly and as creatively as anybody else -- then I was halfway home. I thought, before I die, I am going to build that kind of place in Manchester."

Then he segues into the second photo: a vaulting, graceful building at night, light dancing through the water of a fountain in its front plaza.

"Well, it took me more than 20 years," he says, chatty now, conversational, throttling back to standard PowerPoint patter. "But I was finally able to raise enough money to hire an architect who studied with Frank Lloyd Wright -- the same architect, by the way, who designed the terminal at Pittsburgh International Airport."

But now, when in the normal rhythm of a presentation the speaker would move on to the next image, Strickland crosses you up. He lets that second picture hang up there until it burns into your mind. Then he masterfully shifts key, his next line referring back to his Nancy Wilson-Toots Thielmann opening -- brief, declarative, knock you onto the floor.

"This is Manchester Bidwell," he says. "This is what I built."

Even though the neighborhood lies less than three miles from downtown Pittsburgh, it's a challenge to find Manchester. You cross the Allegheny River over the Sixth Street Bridge and then snake around the gleaming new baseball and football stadiums, built on the ground where the city's mighty steel mills stood. The mills have been gone for more than a generation, their spark and soot increasingly confined to the memories of aging residents. Manchester lies just beyond Heinz Field, home of the Pittsburgh Steelers.

When Bill Strickland grew up in Manchester, it was a neighborhood of sturdy wood-frame row houses filled with generations of steelworking families. Slovaks, Irish, Poles, Italians, and African Americans lived side by side in tolerable harmony, supporting churches, groceries, saloons, streetcar lines, and, most important, public schools where all the kids jostled together, hassling out what it meant to be American. Then, beginning in the 1970s, the steel mills closed one by one, their skeletons torn down for scrap metal. The jobs fled to China and Korea and Brazil, or simply vanished into the clean, melancholy air of postindustrial Pittsburgh.

Today, Manchester survives as a 12-block chunk of decaying homes and defunct businesses that seem bleak and gray on the brightest spring morning. An elevated expressway bisects the neighborhood cruelly. Built in the 1960s, the highway first cut off access to a vibrant commercial district, then carried off Manchester's white residents to new homes in the suburbs. In 1987, Strickland, who still lives in the neighborhood with his wife, Rose, and the couple's 3-year-old daughter (he also has a grown daughter by a previous marriage), opened Manchester Bidwell's now-162,000-square-foot center on the north side of the highway, in an industrial park where hardware stores and haberdasheries once thrived.

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